Pages

Monday, June 30, 2008

While I simply cannot record this again, won't tell you the story though you can surely guess, and I dearly hope the volume is high enough (I'm using Audacity on a PC rather than SoundStudio on my old iMac), it is a plain and slower reading, no echoes, promise!

_______________People have asked if you are supposed to pay for the recording. While I surely appreciate it if you do, no, you don't have to pay for it. You can listen to any of my recordings at SoundClick anytime (streaming is free). I switched from free download to paid because Paintings in the Sand was downloaded about 1500 times and, well, you understand...

Thursday, June 26, 2008

.......................... The woman became spirit in the differentiated dawn. By an attic window of diffused sun with which she's not merging but emerging as light. Dust floats scintillating like myriads of reflectors. Bright as the birdsong of the world, her spirit an unburning flame, a panoply of sparklers, a cluster of luminophor, a throng of stars.

In secret transforming into spirit in the quiet of the dawn hidden in the turret of an old house.

I saw her when I lay down to rest, and remembered so that when I came back I could write of her for you.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

I think it was 1995 when I began mantra recitation, walking, during the hours awake in the middle of the night, while cooking or cleaning, during repetitive tasks at work. Like Hail Mary's, only not Christian, not even necessarily the Sanskrit of my yoga, often ones I made up to suit whatever my needs were.

Mantra filled my mind, plus the meditation I did every day of 15 minutes or more.

It stilled my mind; my mind needed stilling. I left my husband in 1997. There was an ongoing war in my mind. Mantra soothed it. Mantra lifted my weary spirit over and over for the ensuing decade and more. I've come to rely on it to bring me to a state of inner peace.

Two nights ago I decided to let my mind run rampant again. Be as unpruned as it is naturally. I woke at 2am and lay awake until 6am and didn't calm my tumultuous interior with mantra. An hour of extra sleep before rising suffices.

From now on I will only silently recite mantra during my actual meditations, and what a balm they are, those moments of forgetfulness, of not-being, of being gone. The relief of not thinking, of not carrying the pressure of everything, of letting it all go in the ease and peace that mantra brings.

Outside of actual meditation sessions, I will let my mind become what it is. It's safe now. The last thirteen years of honing and focus through continuous mantra have surely had an effect.

Sunday, June 22, 2008

Prep drawing for a new painting. Combining figures from lifedrawing sessions and a very famous Venus, to become part my current work-in-progress: the Botticelli Venus Suite of Poems (I've included some tiny bits of text from my poems which may be lost in the paint, who knows).

Friday, June 20, 2008

Irresistible! As an animal lover, this touches me and if you are, wonderful...

Also I spent ages 2-6 1/2 in Kafue National Park in Zambia living in mud huts with all the wild animals about and the lion who I called "blond," and who I told to "Stop roaring all night, you're keeping Mummy awake!"

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Watching Kurosawa's Ran, very King Lear, but marvelously Japanese, that landscape, warrior fury, splendour of pageant, emotion moving under

Having been laid off recently, these recessionary times, I went to the Korean Video Store where videos apparently sell for $2. In budget! Korean films and a shelf of Chinese & Japanese. Two Kurosawa's later and one described as "very sexy" that won't load...

When I put the "very sexy" video in my laptop earphones in it smells vaguely of burning

...I wish I had more information, there is a Korean note, with "ONLY" in English

ONLY what? And what did the man in the store mean, "there are some scenes..." and selling me a burning disc with mystical Korean calligraphy

on a label on the disc for $2.? Tomorrow I shall go back and say to the old Korean lady who owns the store and who only takes cash, "It doesn't play..."

Is this part of the mystique of the very sexy burning movie ... I did ask for 'art films' in the Korean Video Store afterall.

Hidden mirrors behind the eyes. Like being looked at through shutters that are bright slats of sun.

You can't see anything but you know you're being watched.

Or tracked. Might be the eye of a camera, who knows. I passed a group in the patio of Mel's and all four heads turned and their eyes followed me and then I noticed the camcorder.

On my way to the supermarket to buy a large bottle of spring water with the old bundle buggy broken from dropping the 18 litre bottles into it and which is kept only for that purpose. I filmed them too. They are burned on my optic nerves and in my memory banks. They were as old or older than I, but had the look of the effect of drugs and alcohol, too much of both for too long. If I'd seen the camera earlier when I was closest to them I'd have asked them to turn it off.

I was thinking of someone who is a compulsive liar. The pose, the facade, an insistence that what is presented is the truth. Seamless illusions. Blatant proof otherwise is rendered insignificant with a shrug. And the way of being watched through the slats that reflect the twisting that is presented as truth. Why do I posit myself in a role of moral conscience? Who cares if the neuronal synapses have been forced to present a false version of a person's life and to maintain those appearances and whether in the final dementia there won't be a terror of not knowing what the truth and the fiction is anymore.

The slats are collages of life. Displaced images. Intertexual figments.

Truth is a fiction; fiction is always truth. The conclusion doesn't follow from the premises presented.

Monday, June 16, 2008

This is cool. (What gives you the idea I've run out of things to write about? Whaddya mean? Say it in 140 characters or less.)

His coldness a nuclear chain reaction in me begins and then his desperation and ardour.It's clouding over and we don't want to go out grocery shopping and so we're yelling pizzazazhaha, but we won't, not in the morning, no.We grocery shopped muffins & juice & coffee on the patio & filled out forms before we went in, filling hunger then filling a shopping cart.Ate t-bone, o moan, begroan, dog thrown bone, what to do? What to do? A situation. Avoid? Allow? Be flown with the blowin' rain?.Tinkle chinka of change in the silvered tiny square purse and the chugata chugata ... awhhhh sorry, laundry drums spinning round unbound.Fast 5km dog walk under 200 year old trees, cool sweat, huge nearly round moon, Oscar Peterson's Night Train, stepping out of stepping into.Black Snake Moan. O groan! T-Bone! Rocking scrunchies of laughter!

Sunday, June 15, 2008

I've joined Facebook, MySpace, and now Twitter. Why? Oh, that's a good question... just 'cause. Perhaps to explore, keep in touch with friends close and far (if you're on any or all please send an invite).

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

I purchased an air conditioner, but taking out the screen and the glass and the window frame was an unbearable task and it was returned. What I'd like is an indoor air conditioner, which will have to await funds.

Oppressing each sweating skin cell, the undersides of one's hair continually damp, this is how it is in the heat.

I can only wear a loose cotton dress with my long hair tied up; shorts or pants suffocate.

Place the small fan on a pedestal over the screen of my bedroom window to get a little cooler air. With a wall of windows facing West on the second floor without tree cover, the apartment is an oven. Like anything steamed, we wilt.

Though I like the heat, it must be 40oC! I bring home a large fan and hang it in the front room with string since there is no window ledge, and the beating of air through the paddles of the fan helps.

No-one wants to cook, my son goes to work and my daughter and I go out for Sushi.

The thick clouds have an underside of glimmering red like tropical fish chased by a shark. An anvil of clouds are upon us in the middle of the night and lightning like white veins slice the sky and rain beats on the new fan spraying the room.

In my room, which faces East, I remove the screen. It is fresh outside, and cool. I lean out to breathe the cooler air. The CN Tower's lights are flashing strongly, mesmerizing with the glow of red, then white, then green up the length of the concrete pin. Nothing else is visible on the skyline from where I am downtown.

The sound of heavy rain falling on leaves and rocks, the large tree in my bit of land out back and the pebbles that cover an adjacent parking lot. It's a luscious sound. Water hitting the earth. This bridal veil of rain. Drenching richness. How long do I stand alone in the darkness, in my white cotton nightdress, by the open window, leaning out, breathing rain-filled air?

Thursday, June 05, 2008

The wineof love fills us.We are inebriatedwith loving each otherdistantly.I can’t gather you more closelythan this.I am a chaliceof red lace at the window.You are intoxicatingblossoms burstingcolour over the landscape of myheart.

Monday, June 02, 2008

A test, an experiment. I bought a laptop and made this recording with the built-in webcam. It's fuzzy, oh so fuzzy. I wasn't able to figure out how to edit in Windows Media and so it's as is. It's not going to stay up for long - I do have a video camera that will record a person in motion, and seeing this is enough to make me dust it off... more poetry experiments in the future!

Oh, I wouldn't wear my reading glasses, no, no, so I was using a large magnifying glass to read the poem - it's soooo funny. And don't ask what I was doing with my arm at the end, who knows.

Notes for future recordings: memorize, stay in focus, and anything else you the happenstance reader who might bumble upon this site might add if you come by before I delete this, blush, clip.

Sunday, June 01, 2008

Nearly a year! I read it with surprise and admiration when it made the world news. But how hungry she must have been to take food from his refrigerator, risking her invisibility in his household.

I could see her, worrying, but unable to starve any longer, and not wanting to die in the storage closet she had taken up residence in, and so she crept out like a stowaway, like a church mouse, and helped herself to the offerings.

And thus left evidence of her existence and was ultimately exposed.

Which may be just as well, perhaps there is a home for her in the state. Or perhaps someone will write a book about her and share the royalties with her...

Incredible story of desperation, daring, courage, and finally surrender.

___

(There is a part of me that is still so very 3rd World and who sees life and what it sometimes takes to survive from a different vantage than many people in my culture, I think.)

About Me

BRENDA CLEWS is a poet, painter, dancer, video-maker, mother, friend, muse, mystery-maker, a lover, a solitary, believer in divine sybaritism. 'While we all have an instinctual sense of what 'art' is, it's from a 'Weltanschauung' that is itself art because it is part of the process of conscious life in a world that is a work of art.

Our universe's creativity is beyond our wildest imaginings.'

Brenda was born in Zimbabwe in the then small mining town of Chinhoyi. When she was two her father, D. Richard Clews, who was a geologist, moved her and her mother to Kafue National Park in Zambia, then the largest game park in Africa, as he joined a mining team looking for copper, and where her two brothers were born.

She cites her early years spent in the jungle, barefoot, living in a compound of mud huts, with many wild animals and the wonderful Ndembu people for her deep resonance with the beauty, strangeness and brilliance of the tribal mind and the natural world.

After the time in the jungle came a year in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, and then her father took the family to England where he obtained a doctorate in Geochemistry and accepted a position in Canada. Brenda has lived in Canada since then.

Brenda has a full-length collection of poetry, Tidal Fury, with Guernica Editions, 2016. She has a forthcoming novella, Fugue in Green, with Quattro Books, 2017. LyricalMyrical Press published her chapbook, the luminist poems, in 2013. She hosts Poetry & Music Salons in Toronto.

She has edited university textbooks and creative writing, taught writing, written articles for newspapers, taught Kundalini Yoga, done temporary office work, and dog sitting, while maintaining a reclusive lifestyle of writing and painting. She raised two wonderful children as a single mother. She has a degree in Fine Arts and abandoned a PhD in English Lit many years ago.

Brenda has had solo art shows at York University (2000), Q Space (2013) and Urban Gallery (2014), and been in a number of group art shows including 'Birthtales' (1992) at A Space, 'Birth2' (2004) at Ayer Lofts in the US, '5 By 5' (2013) at The Gladstone Hotel, Yellow House Gallery (2014), SuperWonder Gallery (2016) and Arcadia Gallery (2016). Her artwork has appeared in 'Addiction to Perfection' and as two journal covers and in a poster for ‘ARM Magazine.’

Her poetry has been published in print journals, like 'Tessera,' and 'ARM Journal,' and on-line at sites, including 'Qarrtsiluni,' 'Mothers Movement Online,' and 'The Browsing Corner' (she is not good at submitting her work). She presented papers yearly at conferences at York University and OISE on the maternal body from 2001-2006. Her video poetry has been featured at 'CrossBridge' (an international multidisciplinary journal), and 'Moving Poems ('best poetry videos on the web').

She is a multi-media artist whose approach to a topic may include poetry, painting, theory, dance, recordings, and video. Brenda's oeuvre focuses on the plethora, the multiple callings, the obsessive muse, the prism rather than the spotlight, or on multiple spotlights. She writes, "Where else do you flee? How do you combine yourself?"